• The artist sister is engaged to the art teacher. • She wins an award and tells her sister about the engagement. • Then she has an accident in the car which injures her throat and she can no longer speak. • Meantime the art teacher meets a young man with long hair and falls in love with him. • The young man is set upon by other men, possibly because he's homosexual, and they cut his hair short. • He commits suicide (not sure why) by jumping off a building. • His cut off hair is made into a wig. • The art teacher breaks up with the artist sister either because she's damaged goods without a voice or because he realizes he's homosexual. • Meantime, the sister of the mute artist is hospitalized with leukemia and loses her hair to chemotherapy. • Nothing further can be done for her, so the hospital decides to send her home to die, but her sister tells her she's cured. • Now the film begins. • The mute sister buys the wig for the leukemia sister made from the hair of the suicide. • The spirit of the dead man takes over whoever wears the wig and so the leukemia sister tries to seduce the art teacher. • The leukemia sister doesn't take her medicine because she knows she will look healthier without the pills and either she believes she's cured and doesn't need the pills or she sees through the lies and realizes she's going to die and so why bother taking the pills. • By the end, the mute sister has gone insane from (a) the accident; (b) losing her voice; (c) being rejected by her fiancé and (d) seeing her sister possessed by the dead male lover of her former fiancé; and she kills the leukemia sister.

Like other critics here, I'll invoke the names of some Korean movies that, similar to Gabal, have a special "shine" to them: Bunshinsaba, Tale of Two Sisters, and especially 4 Inyong Shiktak (Uninvited). Like those flicks, Gabal (The Wig) has that special "it."What do I mean? Well, the emphasis is on characters, characters the viewer cares about (I did my fair share of both weeping and recoiling while watching); there's a dreadfully heavy sadness draping the entire affair; there's a palpable feeling of helplessness, of futility. And you simply HATE to see these already world-weary characters wrapped in such a futile, and almost randomly violent, circumstance. This is not a movie about a possessed wig leaping off the floor and strangling people. If you're looking for silly Halloween fun, hit the road. In fact, the movie really isn't about a wig at all. It is about how our fragile bodies are susceptible to diseases, like leukemia, that no one deserves to suffer. It is about how our fragile minds are susceptible to false hopes, and about how manipulative, and downright evil, we can be when we are in relationship with other human beings.The movie confronts forced silence (one of the characters cannot speak, and her voice, when she forces it, sounds like scraping metal or a painfully squeaky door hinge). It confronts death, not in a glamorized way, but a kind of death that is a "wasting away" in an antiseptic hospital bed. The lead character's struggle with leukemia and chemotherapy, and her consequent downward spiral into a supernatural nightmare as she wears a possessed wig to cover her baldness, reminded me, wistfully, of Mann, the main character in the first Pang brothers' movie, Eye (a franchise that has simply gone down the toilet).As a somewhat jaded viewer of horror movies (I suffered through the remake of The Fog a few weeks ago—MEA CULPA!), I am so surprised and practically gleeful when I come across a serious-minded, carefully crafted, complex horror movie that has that special "it," that ineffable substance that is a mixture of artistically presented dread, sadness, loss, and threat--of course with a few jump scares thrown in for good measure! This movie speaks and lives its dread, perhaps not as loudly or as skillfully as 4 Inyong Shiktak (Uninvited), but it comes damn close.

I bought The Wig because I liked the trailer of the movie plus I really like to buy Korean horror movies.I bought it along Red Shoes which I still have yet to see and I really liked it.It's like a mix of A Tale Of Two Sisters in style and Thai movie Shutter in substance which are also really good movies.There are a couple of twists along the way and the end twist,I really wasn't excepting it and it shocked me.I would've liked a happy ending but they chose to make it really sad.I own and have seen A Tale Of Two Sisters,Face,The Ghost,Bunshinsaba and Phone which are all Korean and I would recommend best A Tale Of Two Sisters,Bunshinsaba and The Wig.If you are not interested in seeing The Wig in Korean then maybe you should wait for the remake.

Slightly above average horror tale, albeit very, very similar to Ringu & co. The story (young woman possessed by demonic wig) is OK, not original in any way but a pretty nice premise. It is a well made film with a few surprises, some blood-letting and good performances. But first-time director Shin-yeon Won tells this story in a very uneven and slow manner, and the main characters remain undeveloped throughout the film. The first half of the movie is OK, but during the last 20-30 minutes, the story drags a bit. This is basically just a rehash of earlier and better Asian movies as I mentioned before, and for those who have seen a lot of Korean and Japanese cinema will probably agree with that. This is just nothing special; feels like someone saw "A Tale of Two Sisters" before coming up with the idea for this film.